Instituto del Progreso Latino (Instituto) has developed a new model for providing ESL training to its community of learners. They are combining the best of online educational practice with intensive one-on-one and in-person classroom mentoring to fully meet the needs of their students. CURL will be evaluating this pilot program which is funded by the MacArthur Foundation.

Chicago Public Schools launched the Global Citizenship Initiative (GCI) in 2012-2013. GCI provides rigorous curriculum aligned with high standards, supports high quality pedagogy that meets the needs of diverse learners and reflects best practices in civic education, and generates multiple external learning opportunities throughout the city of Chicago. In short, GCI seeks to move civic education beyond merely rote memorization of facts to fully engage students as active participants in civic life – now and in the future. CURL will be evaluating the 2014-2015 school year as CPS seeks to strengthen and grow the program.

Loyola University Chicago sociologist Peter Rosenblatt is the lead researcher on a new CURL project to examine a security deposit assistance program in Milwaukee that uses the incentive to encourage low-income residents to move to higher opportunity, lower poverty neighborhoods.

The Center for Urban Research and Learning (CURL) will work with Organizing Neighborhoods for Equality: Northside (ONE Northside) on a participatory research project to further document and analyze the Organization of the NorthEast (ONE) and Lakeview Action Coalition (LAC) merger process over the past year that has now created ONE Northside. The impact of the merger is of interest not only to researchers and policy makers focusing on non-profit organizations, but also to other similar organizations seeking to be more effective in their advocacy impact and their financial efficiency. Outcomes of this merger have implications for other organizations in Chicago and the nation.

In a partnership with the Chicago Alliance to End Homelessness and other service and advocacy organizations, the Loyola University Chicago Center for Urban Research and Learning (CURL) and photographer Noah Addis have organized this exhibition to present positive images of individuals moving from homelessness to housing. The exhibition confronts the dominant stereotypes that homeless individuals are helpless street beggars or that organizations serving them are just providing handouts without addressing long-term solutions.

CURL and the Chicago Foundation for Women will be working together on the “Evaluation: The Road from Programming to Policy” program to train organizations that serve women and girls. Expert-led workshops, participant-selected research projects, and community-wide dissemination will deepen organizational understanding of data analysis. The development of assessment as an organizational tool will provide immediate change as well as lasting skills, assisting agencies as they continue to navigate in an increasingly data driven sector.

Alternatives, Inc. and Howard Area Community Center will partner to provide an intensive, coordinated, and trauma informed community approach to working with high-risk youth and young adults (up to age 24) who have been detained at the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center (JTDC) and/or have been adjudicated to an Illinois Youth Center/IDOC placement and are now re-entering their communities.CURL will help evaluate the success of the program.

This is an evaluation for a consortium of safety net health care centers in Chicago and northern Illinois, led by the Lawndale Christian Health Clinic. We plan to assess the implementation of a new training and leadership program in relation to management and staff. We will also assess if the project has improved patient reports of satisfaction and impacted their wait times among other measures.

The purpose of this proposed research is to develop specific strategies for using whole school climate prevention to support the morale of staff when experiencing unexpected change which increases teacher’s stress and may have a negative impact on student’s learning. These findings will be the result of a mixed method study of an urban middle school that was targeted for downsizing in a large urban district and is now implementing school-wide prevention for behavior problems.

CURL and Business and Professional People for the Public Interest (BPI) have created a Knowledge Exchange to assist BPI staff and board members in understanding demographic trends, theory, and current research related to policies aimed at reducing poverty.